The G File (35 page)

It was like photographs from a disappointing holiday, he had thought: a sort of retroactive authenticity – the actual time had been wasted, and the documentation replaced the experience.

For better or worse, of course. ‘It’s always possible to make glittering poetry out of the most appalling failures – and thank goodness for that!’ was something Mahler had once confided in him, and no doubt there was some sort of parallel to that thought in his memoirs project . . . But the urge had left him, the vague desire to record his deeds in print – and of course Ulrike played a vital role in this. As in so much else.

The words from Corinthians came to him once again, and he wondered what his life would have been like if Ulrike had not sailed into it.
If
and
if not
. . . There was no point in speculating on that as well, of course, and he soon grew tired of trying to find alternative ways through the swamp that was life. His own path had turned out the way it did, and if he thought about it at all nowadays, it was with gratitude. Despite everything.

The year of grace?

He abandoned fiction and tried to think about so-called realities instead – about Maarten Verlangen and about Jaan G. Hennan.

What did he know?

Nothing at all, to be honest.

But what did he think, then?

Or,
What did he have good reason to think?
Preferably with the aid of a reasonably sharp razor blade, presumably.

He thought for a while and replaced Pergolesi with Bruckner.

Something had happened.

Indubitably, as they say.

Verlangen had been on to something. But had come too close to the fire and burnt himself.

Not just burnt himself. Been burnt up.

Been killed.

By G?

That was what he had been telling himself ever since Verlangen’s daughter had come to the bookshop and told her tale. But did he really have good reason to believe that?

Did he have any reason at all?

Were the remains of Maarten Verlangen really buried somewhere in the Kaalbringen area (or dumped in the sea) – while the renowned former Chief Inspector Van Veeteren was sitting back in his warm car, fleeing the scene? Was that the reality? For an all-seeing and all-knowing and mildly ironic God?

Good reason? Bullshit.

I shall never sort this out, he suddenly thought. I shall never know how the murder of Barbara Clarissa Hennan was carried out. Nor what happened to Maarten Verlangen fifteen years later.

Nor will anybody else.

It’s so damned irritating, but that’s the way it is.

Former Chief Inspector Van Veeteren was deceiving himself on this point to some extent; but a whole summer would pass before he realized this – and by then he had long since forgotten that he had given up all hope.

The body was found on Saturday, 24 August, by a mushroom picker called Jadwiga Tiller.

It was a beautiful summer’s day. Fru Tiller was seventy-five years old and had been out all day in the mixed coniferous and deciduous woodland between the villages of Hildeshejm and Wilgersee several kilometres to the east of Kaalbringen with her husband Adrian. They had parked next to the log piles at the side of one of the many dirt roads running through the forest and down to the sea, and after a few hours had filled almost two carrier bags with top-class cep mushrooms. She used to tell her friends Vera Felder and Grete Lauderwegs how she had a good nose for mushrooms – ‘I can smell them a mile off !’ she used to say: ‘Even when I’m blind I’ll still be able to sniff ’em out!’ – and thanks to that ability she found herself exploring a little copse of young beech trees, searching around among dead leaves and old husks without finding anything edible, and then stumbled upon a human being.

Or rather, a dead body. In an advanced stage of decomposition – there didn’t seem to be much more left than a few rags of clothing and a skeleton, and for a confused moment Jadwiga Tiller wondered if
that
was the smell that had seduced her. She suddenly felt very dizzy, and had to sit down on a felled tree trunk in order to recover her composure.

That took a few seconds. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted: ‘Kolihoo! Kolihoo!’

That was the call she and her husband had been using in the woods while mushrooming for thirty years or more, and sure enough she heard Adrian’s ‘Kolihoo!’ response from not very far away.

‘Kolihoo! Kolihoo!’ she shouted again. ‘Come here! Now! I’ve found a dead body!’

There was a crashing and crackling in among the bushes, then Adrian Tiller appeared. He continued walking in the direction pointed out by his wife’s shaking index finger and saw what she had seen. Despite the fact that he was an ex-soldier and had seen most of what there was to see, he also felt rather dizzy and needed to sit down. He flopped down beside his wife, took off his checked cap and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve.

‘We must ring the police,’ he said. ‘It’s fifteen thirty-five.’

‘I understand that we must ring the police,’ she said, ‘but why on earth are you telling me what time it is?’

‘Because the police always want to know what time it is when they are investigating a crime,’ said Adrian Tiller.

Inspector Beate Moerk did not place as much importance on the time of the discovery as herr Tiller had done when she sat in her office at the police station in Kaalbringen that evening, trying to sum up what had emerged about the dead man after the first few hectic hours. The body was rather too old for that to matter.

But in any case, it was a man. Evidently somewhere between sixty and seventy. A hundred and eighty centimetres tall, and at the time of his death wearing jeans, worn-out deck shoes, a simple cotton shirt and a blue denim jacket. All the items of clothing were in quite a bad way, of course. According to a very early estimate by the pathologist, the man had been dead for between four and six months, and the cause of death was almost certainly a shot in the head. The bullet had entered through his left temple, and exited through the right one. The gun had been quite a large calibre, possibly a Berenger or a Pinchmann, and the shot had been from close quarters, only half a metre away. No bullet or empty cartridge case had been found.

Nor were there any identification papers or personal belongings, apart from a packet of chewing gum, Dentro Fruit, with two uneaten tablets remaining, in his right-hand pocket. It was impossible to take fingerprints in view of the advanced state of decay, but the Centre for Forensic Medicine in Maardam would be able to establish his dental profile – the body was on its way there for all the usual tests and analyses.

Nothing of interest had been found at or in the vicinity of the place where the corpse had been discovered, nor was there any trace of a fight or struggle. There was a reasonably accessible and usable track only about thirty metres away from the depression in the ground where the copse was located, so it could be that the body had been transported into the woods by car, either dead or still alive.

There was nothing to suggest with certainty that suicide was an impossibility, but no weapon had been found, and the body had been so well covered by leaves and twigs that it seemed likely that somebody had tried to conceal it from the eyes of the world.

Murder, in other words. Inspector Moerk knew that they were landed with a murder investigation. She had said as much in blunt but restrained terms to Chief of Police deKlerk, who was unfortunately attending a family gathering in Aarlach that Saturday, but now – at a few minutes past nine in the evening – ought to be in his car on the way back home from there (travelling in the opposite direction to the hearse with the dead body in it, but bound to pass it at some unknown point, Moerk realized with a suppressed smile), and would turn up at the police station before half past ten.

That is what he had promised, at least: it wasn’t any old day that they were faced with a murder investigation in Kaalbringen, and if you were chief of police, you had appropriate obligations.

Moerk drank the last drop of tea and put her notes away in a yellow folder. Leaned back on her desk chair and gazed out through the open window into the mild autumnal darkness.

Murder? she thought. And then it dawned on her who the dead man must be.

She ought to have realized sooner, of course: but it had been a stressful afternoon and evening. She had been telephoned from the police station by Constable Bang shortly after four, and it had been full steam ahead ever since. For the moment, at least, the case was the responsibility of the Kaalbringen police – although the scene-of-crime and pathology officers had been sent from Oostwerdingen.

It had been all go without much pause for thought: interviews with the elderly mushroom-pickers who had found the body; detailed discussions with the pathologist Meegerwijk and with Intendent Struenlee, who was in charge of the scene-of-crime team; off-putting comments to a few journalists who had somehow (Bang?) got wind of the circumstances . . . Telephone calls here, faxes there: and it was only now – at nine o’clock in the evening – that she had the chance to sit down and think things over for a while.

But that was enough. She suddenly knew who it was that had been shot in the head out there at Hildeshejm . . . Well,
knew
was perhaps a bit of an exaggeration: but if anybody had asked her to place a bet on the outcome, she would have had no hesitation in wagering a considerable sum.

It had to be that private detective – what the hell was his name?

It took her quite a while to dig up the name from the lists of all the others in the archives of Kaalbringen police station, but she found it in the end.

Verlangen.

Maarten Baudewijn Verlangen, to be precise – and of course it was necessary to be precise in a case like this.

So that was the way it was. The missing former private detective whom that renowned ex-detective chief inspector had been here looking for at the beginning of May. But whom they had failed to find. Because there was no trace of him. Full stop.

Moerk nodded decisively to herself. Then she picked up the receiver and telephoned her husband Franek – and for a brief moment when she heard his voice was overcome by a deep-seated longing to be with him.

She told him as much, but he assured her that there was no need to hurry: the two children were asleep, he was busy painting, and was more than happy to wait for her with a bottle of red wine and a big hug until after midnight, if necessary. How was it going with the dead body? he wondered.

She told him she thought she knew who it was – but that she would have to stay at the police station and make a few telephone calls. And also report to deKlerk when he eventually condescended to turn up. But she assured him that as soon as all this was cleared up, she would hasten home and switch off all the lights.

He laughed, and bade her welcome.

She sat there thinking for a while before picking up the telephone again: it was not easy to decide what to do, but she eventually ignored all the objections and rang Bausen’s home number. Since she assumed that the antiquarian bookshop in Maardam would not be open at half past nine on a Saturday evening . . .

And since Van Veeteren had not given her his home number.

Van Veeteren was telephoned in turn by Bausen half an hour later – and having absorbed the brief, preliminary information he was even more convinced than Inspector Moerk that the dead body really was that of Maarten Verlangen.

There were no especially rational arguments to support that hypothesis as yet, of course: but he had dreamt about Jaan G. Hennan (in a remarkable role as a ruthless, horned judge in some kind of war crimes trial) just a couple of nights ago, and he had solved that day’s chess problem in the
Allgemejne
in less than half a minute, which was some kind of record.

There was something in the air, in other words; and after Bausen’s phone call he realized what it was.

Water had flowed under the bridge, to use an image referring to another element, and it was time to write another chapter in the G File.

But this really must be the last one, he thought when he had hung up and returned to his sofa, Ulrike and the Finnish film on Channel 4. I really must put a full stop at the end of all this pretty soon.

There was a time for everything, of course, but there were limits.

‘Who was that?’ asked Ulrike, lifting up Stravinsky and placing him underneath the blanket.

‘Bausen,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘They think they’ve found Verlangen.’

Ulrike picked up the remote control and switched off the sound.

‘The private detective?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yes. Since April, or thereabouts. Just as I’d thought.’

‘How?’

‘How what?’

‘How did he die?’

‘Shot through the head.’

‘What the hell . . .?’

‘You heard right.’

‘Good Lord! Up in Kaalbringen, then?’

‘Just outside – although they haven’t officially identified him yet.’

‘But they think it’s him?’

‘Evidently. It will be confirmed tomorrow.’

Ulrike nodded. Lifted up the cat again and tickled him absent-mindedly under his chin while watching the silent pictures on the television screen. Half a minute passed.

‘What are you going to—’

‘We’ll see,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘It’s a matter for the police.’

‘Of course.’

He sat there thinking for a while, wondering what to say next.

‘Well, anybody’s allowed to go chasing shadows,’ he said in due course. ‘But assumed murders are not something that should be placed on the desk of an antiquarian bookseller.’

‘Of course not,’ said Ulrike Fremdli. ‘Where have I heard that before?’

Chief of Police deKlerk tugged thoughtfully at his right earlobe, and glared at Inspector Beate Moerk.

‘So, that’s the way the land lies, is it?’ he said. ‘I have to say

I’m sceptical.’